In a time when chat rooms, social networking and online forums are commonplace, how far can a company go in monitoring them for negative comments from discontented employees before they are guilty of “cybersnooping”? A case decided last week, involving two servers at the Houston’s Restaurant in Hackensack, posed that question, and a federal jury…
Category: Online
Privacy policies: public vs. private sector
In a Brookings Institute study, “Comparing Technology Innovation in the Private and Public Sectors” (pdf), authors Darrell M. West and Jenny Lu compared the sectors on a number of factors, including privacy and security. They report, in part: A growing number of websites offer privacy and security statements, yet they remain more prevalent on commercial…
IBM crypto snoops data without looking
An IBM researcher has solved a tricky mathematical problem that makes it possible to analyse encrypted data without compromising privacy. Craig Gentry used a mathematical object called an ideal lattice to develop a system called fully homomorphic encryption (apparently you might also know it as ‘privacy homomorphism’). […] With the breakthrough, companies storing confidential, electronic…
Kaspersky gets “good samaritan” immunity
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals filed its opinion in Zango v. Kaspersky yesterday. Zango had sued Kaspersky Labs because Kaspersky’s software blocks Zango’s software. Kaspersky claimed that it was immune to lawsuit under the safe harbor provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 § 230. The district court had granted summary judgment in…